Although Nintendo’s 1H 2012 earnings report isn’t quite what we’ve come to expect from Nintendo, the signs are still positive enough, seeing as how the company cut its operating loss in half in a single year.

Nintendo hasn’t had the best of times with Wii and DS sales, quite expectedly as they’re nearing end of their life-cycle, but the company still managed to improve results. The company lost about $366 million from April to September, which, although obviously not great, is still a significant improvement over the loss of $718 million in the same period last year.

3DS initially suffered a slow start but now turned out to be a lifesaver as its sales were up 64.8 percent. This means sales totaled at 5.06 million units, 2.1 million of which are XL models.

The DS sold 970,000 units while the aged Wii managed 1.32 million. This makes for 62.4 and 60.6 percent drops, respectively, but such results were to be expected, especially in the latter case, what with the Wii U just around the corner.

With the launch of the Wii U, Nintendo expects sales of 5.5 million in 2H of the fiscal year. This may very well be the break the company was hoping for, but we’ll see soon enough whether they can keep up the momentum.

Following the news that Wi-Fi is to be introduced on the London underground in time for the 2012 Olympics, it would seem that not everybody is happy with the move.

New research has revealed that 55 per cent of the British public are against the idea of having Wi-Fi available on the tube. The majority of those against the move claim to be concerned about online privacy.

A new study from www.MyVoucherCodes.co.uk has found that just over half of Britons are unhappy with the move to bring the internet underground. The poll of more than a thousand British people found that most of the people would be concerned for their own privacy when browsing on the tube, particularly when it came to submitting passwords.

A third said they thought it would lead to an increase in thefts on the underground if people had laptops and tablet computers on show at all time. A further 14 per cent of the respondents who were unhappy with it all thought that people spending their whole journey using the internet would lead to ‘increased stress’ whilst travelling. Another seven percent thought people with laptops took up too much room. It depends on what sort of laptop we guess.

Mark Pearson, Chairman of MyVoucherCodes.co.uk, said that attitudes may well have changed in the last year, but it’s quite exciting that Wi-Fi will be made available on the tube during the Olympics. It was quite surprising to find out the number of people who were against the introduction of Wi-Fi on the underground.

“I would’ve thought, particularly with the advances in the world of technology, that people would be happy to see the availability of the internet on the tube; making internet access more readily available in all aspects of everyday life, so it will be interesting to see how people react to it,” he said.

Toshiba is to close three of its six discrete chip-making facilities in Japan and slash output of some of its chips by Christmas.

Tosh claims that demand for PCs and TVs has slid in Europe and the United States and no one wants discrete chips at the moment. The three plants are scheduled to be closed in the first half of the fiscal year starting in April 2012, in a bid to slash costs.

Not only is demand weak, but Tosh has been hit by the price of the Yen which makes it really uneconomic to trade overseas. "There is the high yen, cutbacks by domestic setmakers, especially Sony and Panasonic, and PC sales are weak around the world," a company spokesman said. Toshiba relied heavily on Nokia for sales of its mobile phone chips and that outfit had not been doing so well either.

It is not the only one mothballing its chip-making facilities. Toyota is going to temporarily halt production of analog chips and image sensors at its Oita plant, discrete chips at its Himeji plant, and photonic chips at its Kita Kyushu plant for the next few months.

DICE has confirmed that the console versions of Battlefield 3 will only support a frame rate of 30fps. That is right: both the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 will both only run at 30 frames per second, while the PC version will run at 60fps.

The 30fps will be delivered on both the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 at a resolution of 720p. The PC version, however, will run at full 1080p. Actually, a number of the most popular titles run at 720p, so the decision isn’t that surprising.

Of course, since the Frostbite 2 engine that DICE developed for Battlefield 3 is targeted at the next generation of consoles it only stands to reason that the performance will be increased when the engine is moved to the next generation of consoles; and the engine can take advantage of the additional performance that will be offered in the next generation of consoles.

Steve Ballmer, the man that surely needs no introduction has managed to let slip half of his maximum possible bonus by making a few wrong moves. Namely, it was the Kin fiasco and failure to move fast enough to answer Apple’s iPad.

Needless to say that the competition hasn’t quite been shaking in fear from Kin, but the other reason for the bonus cut ended up being quite important, if not even more. The company called it failure to take advantage of new form factors, which in Microsoft’s book probably means - why didn’t we nick that idea as well?

So, the “poor guy’s” bonus could’ve been anywhere from 0% to 200% of his paycheck, but he ended up getting “only” a 100%, amounting to $670,000 of “poorness”. Strangely enough, this happened despite the fact that he managed to hit record $62.5 billion in sales by launching new Windows and Office and with his efforts in cloud computing and gaming field.